Living
by peggie sue
Summary: /"I need you to know I didn't shoot him for you."/ Olivia Benson wants to live. EO, oneshot.


_**A/N:** Whaaaaat? Two in a row? Well, yes. This is where my insomnia gets me in life. My previous oneshot, Concede, is one way that the premiere could go. This is another, and really, it felt more honest. The promo today was hella nerve-wracking in a lot of ways, but it also showed me that Olivia Benson has a will to fight and live and continue no matter what happens. I'm sorry I doubted her. I'm telling you/asking you/pleading with you to listen to This Year's Love by David Gray while reading. It will make such a huge difference. All feedback is brilliant genius. _

She can't place herself. Not here, but not at work, and certainly not at home. She can't place herself. She doesn't belong in her car but her body doesn't feel like it fits in her bed anymore and her apartment walls keep trying to close in on her, suffocate her, every single night. She tries. She tries to make herself coffee in the kitchen or read a paper on the couch, but the kitchen becomes the place where she'd faltered and the living room becomes the place where she was brutalized and cut and burned by a stranger on the floor and really, she doesn't want that. She doesn't want it to keep coming back like that, but it does.

It will until she no longer lets it.

It has been three months since her attack. She is fine and she is functioning. She wants the world to please, _please_ stop spinning most of the time, but she is fine. One day, when she knows herself again, she will be okay.

She is no longer Olivia Benson, the sort-of-loved, absolutely left, baddass cop that wants justice justice justice over all else and can talk to any victim in any circumstance, ever. She is now Olivia Benson, the sort-of-loved, absolutely left, baddass cop that also likes to play judge, jury, and executioner, who doesn't need a pounding gavel to tell her that some men deserve to die, who's taken after an ex-partner more than a little in the slowly-letting-rage-unwind-all-semblance-of-contro l department.

She'd killed him. She remembers killing him. She remembers looking at him and thinking, _this man should die_, and taking her gun, and making that happen. It seems simple now. It seems like it had all happened underwater, like maybe her eyes had been a little blurry, like her arms had been moving slowly through water or molasses or something else thick as they raised a gun and pulled a trigger. She isn't a murderer. They've told her she isn't a murderer; she was fighting for her life. She had been.

_I want to live._

In her begging, she hadn't felt like a liar. She had wanted to live. Her mind, her heart, whatever controlled her had chosen the end to start feeling alive, and she should have known because she's good at that game, the one where you don't realize what you have until you've already lost it.

_I want to live._

She hasn't done any living yet, not really, but that had been her justification. Somewhere deep down she had thought that she would change, would stop letting all the losses fill her as if she were hollow, would learn to be a human being, be Olivia instead of 4015, instead of numbers across a badge. She wasn't a person, she had thought, she didn't know how, but damn if she wouldn't start trying the second she got out of there. If she got out of there.

Now she had, and nothing's changed. She knows now that it's time.

_I want to live._

That had been the first of her truths. She's coming out here to tell another one. She doesn't know why she thinks he'll be home, why she thinks he'll be at his window or in his living room or laughing in the kitchen or drinking a beer on the porch like it's two years ago or four or six or eight or twelve. She'll always remember the twins like they're eight, and maybe Maureen is still sneaking out and Kathleen is kicking a soccer ball against the house on the driveway side and is still thisclose to breaking a basement window. She respects his life here and her own perverse desire to watch it unfold is, for the first time in a long time, irrelevant.

She doesn't want him to see her like this. She's old, for one. The bags beneath her eyes have only gotten deeper, huge purple circles marring her face. Her freckles are coming out more and more and wrinkles pull at her forehead, her mouth, the space between her eyebrows. Her hair is short because it's less of Lewis that's touching her, and at least he can't brush against her shoulders or the back of her neck anymore, but she hates it. She hates the way it falls out of any ponytail she tries to pull it into and clings to her cheeks and forehead when she wakes up sweaty and screaming and disgusting in the middle of the night. She has a lot of herself to hate and she doesn't want him to see it, but she isn't here for him. She isn't here for his benefit because she doesn't do anything for his benefit anymore. That lie fits right in with the others.

_I want to live._

She doesn't. Not like this, not how she is now.

_I want to live._

What she wants, really, is to change.

_I want to live._

She doesn't know what she'll say but forces herself out of the car, forces herself into the street, forces herself to believe that it's the perfect combination of late and early with which to catch him up, awake, alone. His Jeep is in the driveway and she almost wishes it wasn't, which is disgusting in its own right, because nothing has changed. Two years can go by and make her cold, make her numb, but she's realizing now that they won't dull the edges of the fact that she's in love with him like the sea does to glass after enough waves go by. Maybe time doesn't fix everything and answer all of her questions, but at least now she _knows_.

She knows how it feels to be reckless, to be bleeding rage, to be so out of control that death feels beneath you, up to you, something you can manipulate. She knows how it feels to be petrified by your own hands, your own skin. She knows how it feels to look at a body and think, _I did that_. She knows how not having a reason can sit in the pit of your stomach, awful and black and swollen in the pit of you, growing. She didn't have a reason to kill Lewis. She wanted to live, but this isn't living. He didn't have a reason to kill Jenna Fox, and she doesn't know who she'll be if she keeps following the grooves of his life like this.

She's like water, and his shitty decisions are the only available canyons to fill, to slide into. It's a downhill track and she's losing it, but he has to know. He must have heard, and she needs him to know.

_I want to live._

"You gonna just stand there in the street?"

Her head jerks towards the noise and for a second the breath knocks out of her lungs because he's there. He's right there, sitting on his porch, drinking a beer like tonight isn't different from the night before and the night before that and the night before that one. He's almost an old man and she's still speechless, she still wants to vomit or cry or kiss him. He doesn't move, doesn't stand to greet her. She wonders if they'll fall into step like they used to when they talked or didn't talk, if he can still read her silences from fifty feet away. There's a streetlamp down the block and he wonders if he can tell that it's her or if he's just guessing.

"I'm not staying."

He's silent. He's backlit against the glow coming from inside the house but she imagines the creases on his face and the look in his eyes when they'll lock with hers.

_I want to live._

"I need you to know something," she says, giving her words to the empty air. She's on the sidewalk now, somehow her body has moved, but she's not going up there. She's not sitting with him, next to him, near him. She needs answers but more than anything she needs whatever's living inside her to break, and this is the only way to do it. She's tired. "I don't know what you've heard—"

"I've heard, Liv."

She should have figured that he would already know everything. Almost everything. Barely anything.

"—I need you to know I didn't shoot him for you."

Her voice is raw, like she's said the words a million times and she's tried them out in the mirror and they've never sounded honest until right now in front of him because God, she's looking at the way his whole body is tensed up and rigid and scared, or angry, and she means it, for the first time in months she means something that she's saying, so she tries it out again to see how the truth tastes on her tongue. "I didn't shoot him for you. I shot him for me, Elliot. I... I need you to know that I shot him for me. I killed him for me."

It's a selfish admission. He won't stop her.

"He, um... he had me, he had me laying on the floor, pinned down—h-he... he made me beg. For my life."

She can't decide if Castleside Street is quiet or if she's drowning in the noise from the crickets. It's August but she isn't warm.

"He'd told me, in the interrogation from weeks before... he'd told me that he'd made her beg, the other victim. He'd made her beg in the beginning to live and by the end she was—" her voice cracks and her head ducks, catching the sob. She's crying now and he shoots up, his entire body is straight like a needle and coming towards her but she puts out an arm, a hand, and he stops. He listens. "—he said that by the end, she was begging to die. She wanted to die. He needed me," she swallows, and it's a monotone now, "to want to die."

There is a long pause.

"Did you?" His voice is gruff, hoarse.

She looks up at him and on the sidewalk, bathed in flickering orange, she's small. "For two years, I haven't been able to wake up in the morning and find a reason to live."

It hits him in the gut and he's still. Silent. Stone, maybe.

He can hear her breathing.

"For two years, I have missed every opportunity to fall in love with my own life. I have... I have wasted my time, I have been stuck, Elliot. I have been stuck on this idea that I couldn't be a person without you, that I couldn't be a person without this job. I've missed every Sunday in the park, I forgot to watch the sailboat race by the Alice in Wonderland statue, I stopped eating, I stopped enjoying things, I didn't read anymore, I didn't go to the Met when the public school art exhibits went up." Her eyes fill, her chin wobbles. "I have been dead."

_I want to live._

"And when he had that gun to my head? I... I was bleeding on a floor in a shack in Long Island. He'd poured water on me, he'd made me s-scream, he'd... he'd branded me with a wire hanger. I was his. And he wanted me to suffer. If I'd asked him to die he would have walked away then, just so he could torture me forever, every time I closed my eyes. But he asked me what I wanted. And I realized that I couldn't... I don't have to be half of your partner, anymore. Because there's _so much_ I haven't done."

She's wild, reckless, broken. Crying, and he can't move. He can't get to her in time because it's already too late, and maybe it's always been too late, and maybe that's the point.

_I want to live._

"I killed him, Elliot. I... I shot him, and for a second, I was you. And I didn't know what I had to believe in anymore, because I had ended somebody's life, and I didn't have a reason. I didn't have anything worth fighting for—"

"Yes you did."

"—I didn't. I was alone. And I need you to know that when I realized what I'd done, I... I realized at the same time that I had a life to live. Outside of you. And I," she shakes her head, expels a ragged breath before meeting his eyes again. "I'm always going to love you. To be fallen in love with you. But when I killed him—"

_I want to live._

"I killed him for me. I killed him for _my_ life. Not ours. Not yours."

There is silence screaming around them and its so thick that she wonders how she's breathing. He nods.

_I want to live._

She thinks of her badge and gun on her captain's desk, her papers with them. She's done. It's a beginning.

_I want to live._

She still does.

_I want to live._

And as she turns away from him into the dark, towards her car, towards a city that's awake and inhaling and exhaling, and full of sleeping parents and children and people, and really good pizza three blocks from her apartment that she never got to try, and all of her small loves and the memories of her great one, and shadows in some corners and lights in others, and hearts yet to be had and babies being born and couples getting married and a million books she's been dying to read but hasn't, and those stupid bike tours that people take in springtime, and eight thousand two hundred and forty-five hearts beating without a badge behind them, she knows that this is where she starts.

It had been honest.

_I want to live._

And she will.


End file.
